SAN DIEGO -- The first fashion designer to win the Kyoto Prize, Japanese visionary Issey Miyake made a rare public presentation of his high tech body of work last week as part of the American celebration of the coveted award.
For more than 30 years, Miyake has stunned and, he hopes, amused the world with the odd shapes and movement of his designs. When the fashion establishment was stuffing women into button-up blouses, he showed boxy garments carefully structured to drape strangely, sometimes barely connected to the body beneath. Punk rock embraced his squared designs and translated them into cropped tops with the sleeves shorn off in the '70s, and mainstream fashion still follows his more accessible ideas.
His clothes never look like anyone else's -- dresses that bounce and undulate as if they've never met gravity; lightweight layers of crumpled fabric molded into shapes where trash meets art, and entire ensembles cut from a single piece of double layered cloth woven by computer instruction.
Sister Wendy, the BBC's art nun, once called Miyake's staircase dress "a dress of such lovely gravity that to wear it would impose a moral responsibility."
Two Minutes With the Father of the Kyoto Prize Kyoto Prize founder Kazuo Inamori is a chemical engineer who turned a small long distance phone company into a telecommunications giant. Endowed with the fortune he earned from KDDI and Kyocera, Inamori's foundation awards three annual 50 million yen ($425,000) prizes, for advances in science, culture and human spirit.
The prize recognizes a wide range of achievements. Mathematicians, bioscientists, architects, engineers, sculptors and even film director like Akira Kurosawa have won the Kyoto Prize since it was first awarded in 1985. Geneticist Leonard Herzenberg and statistical mathematician Hirotugu Akaike joined Issey Miyake in the 2006 awards.
Answering through an interpreter, Inamori absorbs each question with eyes shut, then grimaces as he marshals his thoughts.
Wired News: Why is recognizing the advances of the human spirit, side-by-side with science, so important?
Kazuo Inamori: Today people are enjoying a very rich lifestyle, but many people were sacrificed for that goal. Today's human civilization was created at the expense of the planet.
The spirituality of human beings must be treasured and preserved even at the expense of the advance of material civilization. I believe the advent of human civilization alone will not make people happy.
WN: You began your career in the world of physical science. How does being rooted in the physical world affect your thoughts on the advances in electronic communication?
Inamori: Even though I am in the telecommunications industry, the advancement of telecommunications in the past 10 years is far beyond what I ever imagined -- cell phones, the internet, being instantly connected at all times and yet alone, all with extreme complexity. The world we live in today is showing a very strong interest in developing that way of life further and it makes me sometimes wonder if the net is going out of control. I do wonder.
As a chemical engineer, I have seen the material science progress, and it did some harm to humans and the environment but it was confined by the limits of the material. As I see telecommunication advance, I feel it could do harm to human society, to the structure of society. It should be watched carefully.
Miyake launched A-POC, A Piece of Cloth, in 1998 to provide clothes that can be easily assembled and endlessly recycled by the wearer. Designs are woven by machine into a long column of fabric with the clothing pattern etched on, and the buyers begin there, by cutting out their garments. Long sleeves that wrap fingers become short sleeves and gloves with a scissors snip. A dress becomes a top. And in one grand gesture, a bright and poofy vest becomes a chair.
On March 30, he opens his new studio, 21_21 Design Site, in Tokyo.
Technology -- from computers to high-tech fibers to laser cutting -- gives Miyake his edge. Schooled in graphic design and befriended by architects, Miyake began using computers to design in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the designer moved away from runway fashion toward high tech fabrics cut with lasers and molded with heat.
Wired News caught up with the 68-year-old Miyake at the San Diego symposium to ask him about his plans after the Kyoto Prize.
Wired News: Are you ready to become a designer emeritus?
Issey Miyake: I am honored that I won this award, but I am not a teacher. We learn together. I have many young people working with me in Tokyo because I learn from them. We learn together.
WN: Pleats Please and A-POC show a more playful side of clothing, and seem to be more about art and culture than your earlier works.
Miyake: A-POC is a single piece of cloth, a single piece of thread. Now that we can make fabrics do this and we have a framework for design and fit -- it means the clothes become universal. We make a single pattern and we send to many places -- Africa, the Middle East -- and people can make it their own.
We used computer technology to tell a weaving machine how to weave a column of cloth. To me, it's the future of clothing, the 21st century way of making clothes to use frameworks and technology to use cloth efficiently and beautifully.
WN: How did you arrive at the philosophy of your later designs?
Miyake: Fiber is the theme of the 21st century. I want to do less cutting, not much cutting to get shape and to make cuts that allow fabric to change shape and make different forms. Design is that we started naked and we add something but we return to that place of being naked.
WN: Your current designs seem to suggest that the designer is less important than the wearer to challenge the wearer.
__Miyake: __We are looking to people, not the fashion (community) and we are fascinated by technology. People have become consumers; they forgot the ways they can participate in their clothing. A-POC does that. It is important people participate in making their own clothing.
Many of my clothes, I find people wearing very surprisingly. I am pleased to see what people do with them.
__WN: __ How do you stay current on technology?
Miyake: Our studio is very, very full of young people. For the technology to work it's better, we try to have young photographers and young technicians, and young designers.
WN: With a worldwide following, why do you stay in Japan?
Miyake: In Japan, we embrace technology and we are pleased with the advances we make. I am happier to be closer to our manufacturer so I can keep hands-on, so I can go look at the machines and get ideas from how they work.
You put a green leaf sticker on your car to show you are a new driver in Japan. I'm always driving with the green leaf in Tokyo. We are always learning.
Very few young designers stay in Japan. The market for them is not very interesting and the managers do not enjoy creativity. But there is very much growth. Chinese people come to Japan -- they are our best customers. They are learning quickly to wear lighter, unusual clothes and they understand the advances technology promises.
__WN:__Are you preparing for life after A-POC?
Miyake: I don't know yet what I will do next, but I have many ideas. It was a dream to come to A-POC. It takes seven or eight years to be understood, and it is nine years with A-POC. Now we make men's clothes and a new kind of jeans, and I am ready to put A-POC inside a design group (with a longtime design assistant in charge.)
I want to try new ideas to ask how we can connect to the internet, to the world with creativity. That is the idea for 21_21: to go beyond 20-20 sight.
